Protest and Pedagogy: Charlottesville's Black Freedom Struggle and the Making of the American High School(Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South)

Protest and Pedagogy traces how, and in what ways, high school teachers and students sustained and propelled the Black freedom struggle in Charlottesville, Virginia. It centers the relationship between protest and pedagogy within classrooms and the surrounding community of Charlottesville. The story spotlights the resistance of Black teachers and students in the American high school throughout the nation during the twentieth century. Rather than act simply as passive participants in the Black freedom struggle—or outright opponents—Black high school teachers and their students, this book argues, employed a variety of organizing and protest strategies to make schools and communities more just and equitable spaces. Black teachers’ pedagogical approaches in the classroom underpinned protest within and beyond schools. At the same time, Black teacher and student organizing, activism, and protest led to pedagogical reforms in classrooms and schools.

ALEXANDER D. HYRES is an assistant professor in the history of U.S. education at the University of Utah. His career in education started as a secondary social studies and English teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. He earned a PhD in social foundations at the University of Virginia. He is a research affiliate for the Teachers in the Movement Oral History Project at the University of Virginia. He was a 2022 National Academy of Education / Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and received a 2024 Early Career Teaching Award from the University of Utah.

Protest and Pedagogy is a rich local history of race and the American high school in the afterlife of slavery. Through this in-depth study of African American education in Charlottesville, Alexander D. Hyres demonstrates how high schools emerged as highly contested sites in the black freedom struggle—institutions used by some to perpetuate racial stratification in U.S. society on the one hand, while simultaneously serving as political grounds used to advance the causes of racial justice and community uplift on the other. I look forward to teaching and thinking with this book.

Hyres provides a superb analysis that connects the aspirations of a Black high school in Charlottesville to overlooked historic trends of student activism and education justice across the nation. Grounded in oral histories that center the legacy of freedom dreaming in the history of education, Protest and Pedagogy is a must-read at all levels, adding much to a burgeoning and rich historiography during a time that calls for it.